This recipe is for a lovely, reliable, old-fashioned vegan cherry cake – the kind of thing to serve on old china with a cup of tea.
It’s an easy recipe, including ground almonds for a soft texture and a good spoonful of golden syrup for a rich, sweet flavour. Vanilla and a dash of almond extract complement the glacé cherries without detracting from their light flavour. For more of a cherry bakewell flavour, double the quantity of almond extract given in the recipe.
You can use unsulphured cherries of course, but I’ve used the bright red ones for the pictured cake, purely for colour.
The mixture will support whole cherries (ie, they won’t sink to the bottom as cherries are wont to do), but I’ve halved them here because it results in a better distribution throughout the cake.
This cake will rise evenly and should have a thick, dark golden crust. The pictured cake was made with half the quantities below in a 6″ round cake tin (with a slightly shorter baking time). You could also make this as a cherry loaf in a standard 2 lb tin.
vegan cherry cake…
ingredients
- 120 g soft vegan margarine
- 50 g golden syrup
- 130 g caster sugar (granulated will do), plus a spoonful for sprinkling
- 1.5 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp almond extract
- pinch of salt (perhaps 1/16 tsp)
- 270 g self-raising flour
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 80 g ground almonds
- 160 ml oat (or other non-dairy) milk
- 180 g glacé cherries
method
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F. Lightly oil and line the base of a 7″ or 8″ cake tin.
- Halve the cherries and set aside. There’s no need to wash the syrup off them.
- Place the golden syrup in a large bowl, and warm it just a little in the microwave so that it’s becoming runny. (Note that the quantity is in grams not mls, because it’s so hard to measure mls of golden syrup accurately.)
- Add the margarine and sugar to the syrup and beat with an electric hand whisk until it’s light and fluffy. Then add the vanilla and almond extracts and beat a little further.
- Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a separate bowl, then add the ground almonds and stir to combine.
- Add half of the flour mixture to the margarine and sugar mixture, and fold until roughly combined. Then add half of the oat milk, and stir lightly before adding the rest of the flour mixture, the cherries and the last of the milk. Fold/stir gently just until everything is evenly combined.
- Transfer to the tin and level the top before sprinkling with a dessert spoonful of sugar and baking for around 45 minutes. If the cake is looking very brown after about 35 minutes place a disk of baking paper on top. When it’s ready an inserted skewer should come out clean.
- Allow the cake to cool completely before cutting, and ideally for several hours/overnight. It will be very soft until it settles.
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